Justice for Prisoners

Although one wouldn’t know it from popular caricature, conservatives have frequently condemned the abuses that occur routinely in America’s prison system. (Even Rich Lowry has written about this.) With that in mind, the $10,000 grant awarded to Pat Nolan of the Prison Fellowship by the Freda Utley Foundation at CPAC last weekend is very much worthy of note. Here’s the video of TAC‘s associate publisher Jon Basil Utley — Freda Utley’s son — presenting the award:

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3 Responses to Justice for Prisoners

We should bring back “hard labor,” “the chain gang” and horsewhipping or caning. I’m serious. The costs to states and the U.S. government of the present system of incarceration exceeds $75 billion per year. Rather than rehabilitating criminals, our prisons reinforce criminal behavior and encourage institutional rape and degeneracy.

Instead, non-violent offenders could be put to work in garment, textile, shoe or leather factories where we have lost substantial jobs to China. They would be paid a wage, have better quality food, live in a group dormitory and, most important, they would be entitled to conjugal visits. Good work habits and good behavior could result in early parole, an added incentive.

Violent offenders could be assigned to hard labor on farms (displacing illegal aliens) or in dangerous or unpleasant jobs shunned by ordinary workers. If they refused to work, they would be chained to a wall and fed bread and water. Tough love to bring them to their senses. Flagrant misbehavior on the job could get them caned. They, too, would be rewarded by being paid and allowed conjugal visits. This would be a better form of rehabilitation than sitting in a cramped cell where all they can think about is sex.

And let’s free white collar criminals like 86 year old John Rigas of Adelphia Communications, a combat veteran of WWII and an engineering graduate of Rensselaer Polytechic Institute who did nothing more than try to keep control of the company that he founded by borrowing money in the company’s name to buy newly issued stock. He is a victim of overzealous prosecution by Bush Jrs. attorney general, John Ashcroft. Spending 40 or 50 thousand a year to keep Rigas in prison is a waste of taxpayer money.

Two of my co-workers are ex-cons. One of them is going back to prison, and for a long time. I asked the other one if he could sum up in a brief way the sort of conditions that the other man was going back to. He looked at me, lowered his voice, and said the following:

“In there, starvation is used as a weapon.”

He might have talked about rape or gang life, since those are two other prominent elements of prison life, but he didn’t. He took it back to the most basic fear of all, the fear of starving to death. Our prison system needs to be reformed, and badly.

Some large percentage of the people on wall street and who run banks and hedge funds belong in prison (criminal fraud!) next to Madoff, but instead we jail non-violent drug offenders.

You cannot have unjust laws and just prisons at the same time. Art R above seems to think there is some omniscient system for finding evil people so they would be heavily punished. Instead you get a lot of the most evil people escaping punishment and people only through circumstance or error getting the brunt. Or he loves government and anyone not obsequiously obedient to any whim in the hundreds of thousands of pages in the federal register deserves severe punishment merely for the act of this disrespect, not for any actual harm to any individual or society.

My contention is that this doctrine, merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being.

The reason is this. The Humanitarian theory removes from Punishment the concept of Desert. But the concept of Desert is the only connecting link between punishment and justice. It is only as deserved or undeserved that a sentence can be just or unjust. I do not here contend that the question ‘Is it deserved?’ is the only one we can reasonably ask about a punishment. We may very properly ask whether it is likely to deter others and to reform the criminal. But neither of these two last questions is a question about justice. There is no sense in talking about a ‘just deterrent’ or a ‘just cure’. We demand of a deterrent not whether it is just but whether it will deter. We demand of a cure not whether it is just but whether it succeeds. Thus when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’.

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Christianity is all for punishment BECAUSE of the dignity of even the fallen human being instead of denying that dignity. Even prisoners are persons, human beings. When they are in prison, or even executed (note: I’m against it in the 21st century), it is to extract justice. Not to deter others, not to “cure” them, but to balance the scales. They remain human during their incarceration.

Instead we have ISO9000 defect piles with rework. They aren’t human beings, merely defective “carbon units”. And this bleeds into society – the airport scanners? Aborting after a test detects a defect?